The Voice of Sustainment: Design Ethics as Futuring

This paper reports on a pilot study on the design phase in Norwegian construction projects using elements from lean construction approaches. The ambition has been to establish a descriptive picture of ethical challenges in the design phase in general, and of projects characterized by lean design in particular. In addition to a literature review and a document study, interviews with key participants were carried out according to a qualitative approach. The study was undertaken in order to address both general questions of ethics in construction project management, and more specific questions pertaining to the design phase of such projects. This research finds indications of actors manoeuvring in the design phase for own benefit at the expense of other actors. The findings indicate that the design phase poses significant challenges in light of tender documents pricing and exploiting cost reimbursement contracts. In some of the projects examined, participants were found to shift loyalt...

DRS2016: Future-Focused Thinking, 2016

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Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD4) 2015 Symposium. Banff, Canada, September 1-3, 2015., 2015

The relationship between ethics and design is most usually thought of in terms of applied ethics. There are, however, difficulties with this: for instance, conventional ethical stances such as deontology or consequentialism depend on procedures (predefined rules, optimisation) that are inapplicable in the sorts of complex situations which designers commonly face. In any case, it is not as if ethics is a settled body of theory that can act as an authority with which to guide practice. Depending on which theories we refer to, we receive different, and often directly conflicting, guidance. Paralleling the idea that design has its own epistemological foundations, rather than needing to import ideas from science, I propose an alternative way to think of the relation between design and ethics, looking to (1) the ethical questioning implicit in what designers do, and (2) the similarities between those situations which they encounter as a matter of course and those questions with which normative ethics is both most concerned and confused. I suggest that we might reason about ethical questions in design in design's own terms and, also, that rather than apply ethical theory to design we explore what design can contribute to ethics, inverting the more usual hierarchy. Design and ethics The relationship between ethics and design is most usually thought of in terms of applied ethics—as the application of normative ethical theories to design practice, for instance in terms of questions about agency, professional ethics or our relationship to technology or the environment. There are, however, difficulties with this. Firstly, as with any instance of applying theories to design that are external to it, what is special about design itself can become obscured. Secondly, it implies that ethical considerations are external to design questions, a view that can lead to seeing ethics as conflicting with design, either as an amelioration of design ideas or a radical innovation. In any case, it is not as if ethics is a settled body of theory that can be straightforwardly treated as an authority with which to guide practice: depending which theories or ideas we refer to, we receive different, and often directly conflicting, guidance as to what to do. There are parallels between this and the relationship between design and science. With the exhaustion of the attempt to provide a rational basis for design through the application of the scientific method, usually referred to as the Design Methods Movement, Nigel Cross, John Naughton and David Walker (1981) argued that, given what they identified as a state of epistemological chaos in science at that time (following critiques such as those of Paul Feyerabend, 1975/1993), scientific method was not a fruitful basis for design. Similarly, while we may wish to treat ethical philosophy as authoritative, it is unstable as a point of reference. As Terry Eagleton (2003, p. 229) has noted, we might expect to agree on general principles and diverge on particulars, yet we have no common view on many everyday ethical questions. Even with those questions where we have widespread agreement over an action being ethically good or bad, there is little agreement on why this is the case. Whether this state of disagreement is understood as a conflict between objective goods (Berlin, 1958/1998), an inevitable property of our subjectivity (Sartre, 1948) or as resulting from the dissipation of any overall idea of the good life with which to make different goods commensurable (MacIntyre, 1981/1985), the situation in which we find ourselves is that anything to which we refer to help clarify an ethical

Design Philosophy Papers, 2006

Technology is human behavior that transforms society and transforms the environment. Design is the cornerstone of technology. It is how we solve our problems, fulfill our needs, shape our world, change the future, and create new problems. From extraction to disposal in the life-cycle of a product, the design process is where we make the most important decisions; the decisions that determine most of the final product cost, and the decisions that determine most of the ethical costs and benefits. It is quintessentially an ethical process. Ethics is not an appendage to design but an integral part of it, and we advocate using the moral imagination to draw out the ethical implications of a design [1]. We will stress and develop the social ethics paradigm, because design is an iterative social process for making technical and social decisions that may itself be designed at each stage with different people at the table, different information flows, different normative relationships, different authority structures, and different social and environmental considerations in mind . Despite the considerable recent growth in the literature and teaching of engineering ethics, it is constrained unnecessarily by focusing primarily on individual ethics using virtue, deontological, and consequentialist ethical theories. In contrast, the social ethics method requires an examination of the social arrangements for making decisions that is particularly relevant to the iterative, decisionmaking, design process. Different social arrangements may be made for making any decision, each of which arrangement embodies different ethical considerations and implications. Dewey argued in much the same way for a scientific and experimental approach to ethics in general:`What is needed is intelligent examination of the consequences that are actually effected by inherited institutions and customs, in order that there may be intelligent consideration of the ways in which they are to be intentionally modified in behalf of generation of different consequences.' . The social ethics paradigm that we will unfold owes much to the pragmatist thought of John Dewey.

Ethics, Design and Planning of the Built Environment, 2013

Our contemporary " fi rst" world societies seem to be drifting in a state of cultural crisis. This has been notable for the past several decades. As planning theorist John Friedmann (1993 , p. 482) put it sometime ago: What we are living through in the fi nal decades of this [20th] century is something altogether different. It is nothing less than the collapse of the Euclidean world order of stable entities and common sense assumptions that have governed our understanding of the world for the past two hundred years. Rather than abating, this crisis seems to have become chronic and perennial, though often ignored. It relates to profound changes in how we see the world (our conceptual frameworks or paradigms), in how we come to know (epistemology), in how we decide what we ought to do (morality or normative ethics), and in how we fi nd meaning in our lives. The fi rst wave of change came from the modernist replacement of religious faith by science as foundational source of knowledge and justi fi cation. This led to scientism-the claim that the scienti fi c method was the only source of knowledgeand the dominance of a mechanistic and instrumental mode of thinking. The second wave 1 was the postmodernist questioning of the very possibility of any sure foundation for knowledge, leading to a loss of the modernistic faith in science (Harper and Stein 2006). The result of this challenge was an erroneous 2 (but widespread) view that there is no longer any way to justify our beliefs and values. Our contemporary (economically) advanced societies seem to be under the sway of a confused combination of modernist "instrumental reason" and postmodernist "soft relativism," leading to a narrow and self-absorbed search for "authentic identity" and a loss of vigor in political culture (Taylor 1991) .

2016

Her research focuses on design, organizational identity, identification and socialization, team communication, innovation, and technology. She is currently working on an NSF grant examining ethical reasoning and decision-making in engineering project teams, and examining the relationship between teams and individuals in engineering design from a social constructionist and social network perspective.

Design is often thought of as an activity seeking to change existing situations into preferred ones, which might suggest that it is ideally situated as a tool for responsible and active socially engaged citizenship. However designers often inhabit a conflicted ethical space, expressing a desire for responsible citizenship while often behaving in ways they themselves acknowledge do not live up to this standard. Understanding of the nature of these phenomena is of vital importance to attempts to support the socially responsible citizenship of designers. This paper briefly touches on some coping-strategies used by those caught in ethical conflict, before proposing a further suggestion of specific relevance to design, a concept of an/aesth/ethics: by which we anaesthetise ourselves to ethical pain by aestheticising ethics. This paper presents the case that there is hope for genuinely ethical design in an increasingly aestheticised world by drawing on Wolfgang Welsch’s suggestion that the root of ethics emerges from within the aesthetic itself. Design, which for so long has been a principal contributor to an/aestheticisation, contains within itself - precisely due its aesthetic nature - the potential to return feeling to a society which finds itself constantly numbed to true ethical being.

In assessing the ethical load of the industrial design process, the designer is often seen as a creator of ethical problems. Instead, the designer has the capability and the resources for constructively incorporating ethics in the design process and therefore for constructing ethics from within the process. To do so, three terms that influence the design process are assessed: society, the designer and the product. A trust relation and responsibility that is present between the society and the designer, the way of reasoning of the designer and the designer’s role and resources within the design process are described in order to propose a constructive implementation of ethics in the design process. These terms taken together result in a proposal for implementing ethics in the definition of the “product principle solution”.

Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics 2017, 2017

This paper presents a collection of 'ethical by design' principles for considering ethical aspects in the design and implementation of technology-based products and services. It is a work-in-progress describing the need for new, innovative concepts and approaches in ethical design-based thinking. The paper argues that design thinking should and can be 'ethical by design'; that designs should strive to go beyond the ethical guidelines that are set by regulatory bodies and other such governance. This manifesto of 'ethical by design' principles is intended to support developers, providers, and users in the collaborative process of inherently and explicitly including ethics into product and service design.

Past present and future of design ethics, 2024

With the ever-more present climate crisis, resource shortage and the expansion of AI, the core question of the ethical aspects of our development of new products and solutions becomes unavoidable. But which topics are commonly discussed in design ethics literature and how has it evolved? To answer this question and to understand the existing underpinnings and foundation of ethics in design, we adopted a structured literature review searching literature across 42 renowned scientific design journals. A systematic search revealed 1177 academic publications relating to the topic. After filtering and reviewing the titles, abstracts and keywords of these publications, a total of 121 sources were singled out as qualified to constitute the foundation of this review. From these, 8 central themes in past and present design ethics research were identified: Design processes and practices, design education, participatory/cocreation, responsible design, social design, sustainability, technology, and human-centred design of which the three predominant themes are related to questions of the designers´ role and actions (design processes and practices), the effects and consequences of new developments(technology), and the common objectives of addressing the urgency of ecological imbalance (sustainability). This opens a discussion of future research, what are we missing?

Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics 2017

This paper presents a collection of 'ethical by design' principles for considering ethical aspects in the design and implementation of technology-based products and services. It is a work-inprogress describing the need for new, innovative concepts and approaches in ethical design-based thinking. The paper argues that design thinking should and can be 'ethical by design'; that designs should strive to go beyond the ethical guidelines that are set by regulatory bodies and other such governance. This manifesto of 'ethical by design' principles is intended to support developers, providers, and users in the collaborative process of inherently and explicitly including ethics into product and service design.

Design is a phenomenon that supplies continuity; starting from the existence of mankind up to the present has been passing and constant change is ongoing. People, starting out with a sense of needed products have begun to design. Designing stage throughout time, starting with the abstract and the concrete from the area as we get product designs in line with the changing human needs is composed of. People are starting to occur in accordance with the needs and requests of ethical theories in product design that is a subject of discussion within in this area. In this subject, product design shaped by ethical and in the framework of product design concepts are explored through the designer's social responsibility.

Conference Companion Publication of the 2020 on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

Recent public discussions about technologies and social values have called for greater consideration of ethics during technology development and deployment, leading many organizations to create and promote compliance-or checklist-oriented toolkits and frameworks to address values and ethical issues. However, surfacing discussion and consideration of ethics in broader, more open-ended ways during the design process may help surface unique needs, social corner cases, or new or different understandings of values and ethics. This one-day workshop will convene CSCW researchers and practitioners to propose and consider new interventions and approaches to ethics in design that go beyond formal checklist-and compliance-oriented approaches. CSCW's rich set of methods when investigating values and ethics provides a starting point for developing new approaches and interventions. These may potentially include design activities, games and roleplaying, critical making, changes to work practice and organizational structure, or conducting empirical research. Our goal is to explore multiple and alternative forms of values and ethics interventions, rather than coming to a particular "best" approach. This workshop aims to map out a space of interventions for values and ethics, propose new approaches and interventions, and craft an agenda for experimenting with and evaluating new interventions. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

Springer eBooks, 2015

The responsibility of engineers and designers for the products they design is a common topic in engineering ethics and ethics of technology. However, in this chapter we explore what designing for the value of responsibility could entail. The term "design for the value of responsibility" can be interpreted in (at least) two ways. First, it may be interpreted as a design activity that explicitly takes into account the effect of technological designs on the possibility of users (and others) to assume responsibility or to be responsible. Second, it may refer to a design activity that explicitly affects the allocation of responsibility among the ones operating or using the technology and other affected people. In this chapter, we discuss both interpretations of design for the value of responsibility. In both interpretations, a technological design can be said to affect a person's responsibility. As there are no explicit methods or approaches to guide design for responsibility, this chapter explores three cases in which design affected responsibility and develops on basis of them design heuristics for design for responsibility. These cases are the alcohol interlock for cars in Sweden, the V-chip for blocking violent television content and developmental podcasting devices in rural Zimbabwe. We conclude by raising some open issues and suggesting future work.